It's "danah boyd." All lowercase.
Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#22MySpace is planning a major rebranding / relaunch soon. via http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=144480
But how far can they get with just a relaunch? Unless they find the perfect mix of privacy, clean interface, and a huge influx of people, a relaunch would be all for naught.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#23They didn't flee the DG of MS because you can't get stabbed, robbed, raped or shot by blacks on MySpace, only in real life.
They fled MS because it sucks. It looks like everyone's first web page, before they learned CSS and still thought the blink tag was cool.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#24I don't know, but I've been describing twitter as a 'digital ghetto' for months now. If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way. EDIT This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !" I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.
Why did you follow that person?
@DotSauce Agreed. I keep my account honed to my actual friends and a few other people. When people add me and are clearly not into tech or anything I tweet about, I block them. So far, I've stayed spam-free.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#25could it just be that MySpace gave its users too much freedom in page design and it turned into an ugly, blinking, unreadable, music auto-playing pile of s#it? And then people left?
That's part of it, although I think it's more along the lines of MySpace not providing proper customization tools in the first place. Once it was discovered that users could redesign their pages in a very hacky method it really went downhill. I mean, stuffing CSS in the "About Me" form field? That's not a real way to provide customization options.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#26could it just be that MySpace gave its users too much freedom in page design and it turned into an ugly, blinking, unreadable, music auto-playing pile of s#it? And then people left?
Maybe. Aesthetic tastes differ, and the paper does provide some anecdotes suggesting that MySpace's profiles appealed more to certain racial and socioeconomic groups. However, social networks do a pretty good job at segregating - as long as your friends are bourgeois and share your bourgeois design sensibilities, you can use MySpace without bumping into too much 'profile bling'. Instead, it seems that some white and…
Could a startup trigger a similar 'white flight' in an established service by intentionally appealing to the most economically valuable demographic? Can we build good niche businesses by creating things like race-specific Twitter clients?
Would it be ethical to do so?
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#27"It's not really racist, but I guess you could say that. I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever."
This is basically his thesis statement? Here's mine...
Christopher Mims you're a fucking goof not a journalist. Here's a gun, go kill yourself.
What a retarded article.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#28could it just be that MySpace gave its users too much freedom in page design and it turned into an ugly, blinking, unreadable, music auto-playing pile of s#it? And then people left?
Maybe. Aesthetic tastes differ, and the paper does provide some anecdotes suggesting that MySpace's profiles appealed more to certain racial and socioeconomic groups. However, social networks do a pretty good job at segregating - as long as your friends are bourgeois and share your bourgeois design sensibilities, you can use MySpace without bumping into too much 'profile bling'. Instead, it seems that some white and…
Can we build good niche businesses by creating things like...
Yes. And they'd be "niche" in the sense that Fox News is "niche." (Best comment on Fox ever: "They discovered a previously untapped market niche: half the country.")
Half the country, literally, is so far off the radar screen for most software companies it is embarrassing.
There are dating sites for every conceivable slice of the demographic pie. This applies to many other sites too, although I think a lot of folks don't realize it. (You guys know Demand Media because of their SEO strategy, not because they are dominating the Internet of interest to your demographic.)
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did you follow that person?
I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't. The whole follow me, and I'll follow you thing is effective from a marketing point of view, which is why the place is filled with useless affiliate spam. They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle spam. Why can't I sor…
> I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't
In no way is that not your fault. None whatsoever.
I do agree that a filtering mechanism would be MUCH appreciated, however.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't. The whole follow me, and I'll follow you thing is effective from a marketing point of view, which is why the place is filled with useless affiliate spam. They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle spam. Why can't I sor…
> I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't In no way is that not your fault. None whatsoever. I do agree that a filtering mechanism would be MUCH appreciated, however.
You are a coder, aren't you?
Let me restate it more precisely: The fact that my needs are not being met is their fault. The fact that I have those needs is mine.
My use case, and those of many others, requires the ability to 'follow' others and still filter their 'useful' postings from their 'non-useful' postings. This is 'my fault', in that I require more from the service than they are either willing or able to provide at this time.
Twitter has reduced my ability to use the service, in the way that I would most like to, by limiting their API and preventing screen scrapers from functioning in a legal and non-harmful way. None of this is any way my fault.
I still think my original phrasing was more concise, if not as explicit.